Another Tumblog is being made into a book, this time with a little help from David Shields. Jeff, One Lonely Guy is a collection of recorded conversations and correspondences that were the result of one guy, Jeff Ragsdale , posting a flyer with his phone number all over NYC. Shields is helping Ragsdale arrange the responses he received for publication as an ebook. Ragsdale isn’t, according to his Tumblr, all that lonely anymore. Which makes me wonder how Mark Z. Danielewski’s fairing on OK Cupid?
So lonely
Heathcliff Whr R U
The Guardian published a couple of fun pieces earlier this week. The first is a hilarious excerpt from Mallory Ortberg’s Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters. The second is a collection of the top ten most memorable meals in all of literature.
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Being Ernest
Is your family concerned about you? Are all your Victorian relatives vaguely scandalized by your presence? Then you just might be in a character in an Oscar Wilde play. At The Toast, a list of ways to tell.
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Nabokov Speech Published in English for the First Time
In 1925 Nabokov delivered a colorful talk on boxing to a circle of Russian émigrés living in Berlin. Yesterday, that pugnacious passage was published for the first time in English.
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The Wives of Russian Masters
“Russia's most celebrated writers - including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam - are often depicted as solitary geniuses. But many of their works were the fruits of creative partnerships with their wives. Far from being passive typists, they served as editors, researchers, translators, publishers and more.”
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New Vampire Weekend
According to Chris Richards at the Washington Post, the Ivy League rockers of Vampire Weekend are the unapologetic Bright Young Things of our recession era. Drinking Darjeeling on Daddy's yacht never looked so good, he says, and their second album, Contra, out yesterday, sounds pretty good too.
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Mary Ruefle in Conversation
New Yorkers: don’t miss your chance to catch Madness, Rack, and Honey author Mary Ruefle in conversation with Alice Quinn. Also, be sure to read Ruefle’s essay, “I Remember, I Remember” if you haven’t yet done so.
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Douglas Adams Poem Unearthed
This month, a Brentwood School archivist unearthed a two-page poem entitled "A Dissertation on the task of writing a poem on a candle and an account of some of the difficulties thereto pertaining.” The kicker? It was written by a 17-year-old Douglas Adams, nine years before he published The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.